Fish and aquatic news

Thousands of dead octopuses have washed up on a beach in northern Portugal. So far, no one has been able to explain what’s happened to them.

“It was hard not to laugh underwater and flood your [scuba] mask,” says biologist Mark Norman who, together with fellow researchers from Melbourne’s Museum Victoria, photographed an octopus crawling along the ocean floor off the coast of Indonesia with two coconut shell halves suctioned to its underside.

A 19.5 feet long squid – that’s almost 6 meter – has been caught in the Gulf of Mexico by a group of scientists from the NOAA’s* Southeast Fisheries Science Center and the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service. This is only the second known giant squid caught in the Gulf of Mexico and the last one was collected 55 years ago.

Since the early days of the 20th century, marine biologists have pondered one of the world’s most puzzling questions – if a tree falls in the ocean, can the cephalopods hear it?

The discovery of three new species of fossilized octopi in Lebanon has caused scientists to suspect that the first octopus appeared tens of millions of years earlier than previously thought.